They loved John Paul II. But will the millions who crammed into Rome last week in hopes of paying homage to the dead pope – and the billions who saw the funeral on television worldwide – still love the Catholic Church after his departure?

That’s the question facing the Catholic cardinals as they move from mourning one pope to selecting another. The overwhelming facts are these: the Catholic Church is in decline in its traditional homeland, Western Europe, stagnant in its wealthiest enclave, the United States, and faced with severe competition from evangelical Protestants in its potentially fastest-growing area, South America.

As many observers have noted, not even the charismatic John Paul II managed to turn these ominous trends around. The conclusion being drawn in many quarters is that church dogma itself needs to be drastically updated to get Catholicism on the side of history – beginning with an accommodation to the supposed realities of human sexuality and extending to a more activist stance on issues such as poverty and the environment.

In other words, John Paul II may have been the right man for the Cold War, but the cardinals now need to select a pope who will better fit the post-Cold War, post-modernist future.

But there are reasons to wonder if getting on the side of history is either an appropriate role for a church that links itself to Peter and Paul – or whether the message from the spontaneous, massive outpouring of emotion Rome last week was precisely an expression of admiration for a pope, and a church, that did so much to change history. If getting on the side of history means embracing the radical individualism at the core of what passes for post-modernist thought, the church’s slide could accelerate.

The next pope may well be a transitional, compromise figure, of course. If the cardinals select a doddering 75-year-old as their next leader, you will know they have put the real decisions off to the future. But it seems just as likely that a cardinalate totally dominated by appointees of John Paul II may feel a duty to carry forward the hard work, begun under John Paul II, of finding a way between radicalism and reaction.

For the fact of the matter is that John Paul II, far from being a simple-minded reactionary who everywhere and always opposed modernity, was a theological moderate who wrestled hard to rediscover, on behalf of his drifting flock, the hard truths that lie at the center of human dignity and an ordered society. His real legacy may be less a matter of conservatism or liberalism than a church that uses both faith and reason as the means of finding its way – a church largely reconciled to the Enlightenment, in other words.

In volumes of writings, encyclicals, letters to the faithful, and speeches, John Paul II tackled the big issues: Why is marriage between a man and a woman the only legitimate form of sexual union? Why is socialism an offense to human nature? Why do the tools of modern genetics lend themselves to evil as well as good? Why is it the duty of Catholics to oppose abortion? What, indeed, is the meaning of faith?

None of these are easy questions, and John Paul II never treated them as such. Probably few of the millions who made their way to Rome last week would have agreed with his conclusions on everything. But they probably suspected he was also on to something big, bigger even than the fall of communism – the dignity of man – and respected his dogged insistence that we give a hard second thought to the notion that man is some sort of self-sufficient package who can live apart from faith in God.

No church can afford to be totally unbending. As a Protestant, I share some of the doubts of critics both inside and outside the Catholic Church about various specific church policies. But the worldwide reaction to John Paul II’s death suggests a world that has tested the limits of radical individualism, liberation theology, and all the other false promises of heaven on earth, and may be preparing for a swing back to faith – but, if John Paul II is remembered clearly, a faith tempered by reason and love.

Mr. Bray is a Detroit News columnist.