At about the time Pope John Paul II died on Saturday, I was driving back to Connecticut from the People’s Republic of Amherst, Mass. I had gone to give a talk at Amherst College courtesy of the Colloquium on the American Founding, perhaps the only conservative initiative still thriving in the five-college area. If by some chance anyone from Amherst or environs is reading this, please do not publicize the Colloquium: it’s not the sort of thing that the academic Diversity Police like to see happening in their anti-Bush redoubt.

News of the Pope’s impending death was ubiquitous on Friday, even in the People’s Republic. Radio broadcasts in both bookstores I visited were breathless in their summaries of the Pope’s failing health, his legacy, and his possible successor. A clerk in one store seemed oblivious of the news until I asked whether a report from the Vatican meant that the Pope had died. “Don’t know,” he muttered, managing to communicate in those two syllables a bristling compact of indifference and distaste for the entire politically incorrect subject.

I do not look at television at home, but I often indulge in a bit of channel surfing when I am in an inn or hotel just to remind myself of how bad it is. I am seldom disappointed. Coverage of the Pope’s final hours was typical in its ham-handed unity of sentimentality, ignorance, and voyeuristic sensationalism. I think my favorite observation came from the news commentator who assured listeners that “experts say that the Catholic Church is expected to survive the Pope’s death.” I just love experts.

There was something unseemly about the media death-watch for the Pope: the endlessly repeated snatches of biography retailed in tones of forced solemnity punctuated by potted histories of this or that bit of Church arcana: “And now tell us what the College of Cardinals is, Connie.” When, on Saturday, word came that the Pope had died, age 84, the press and broadcast torrent became a cataract. Genuine expressions of sorrow and relief – the Pope had been suffering greatly from a battery of debilitating ailments, including Parkinson’s disease – competed with the media circus.

The New York Times continued its longstanding policy of arrogant hostility to the Church. It instantly had a valedictory piece about the Pope on its Web site, of course, the chief point of which was to cluck knowingly over the Pope’s un-Timeslike position on issues like sex, abortion, and the ordination of women. To this end, it quoted Hans Kung, the renegade (the Times called him “eminent”) Swiss theologian who bemoaned the “many bad decisions” of “the most contradictory” Pope of the 20th century.

Times watchers know that one of the paper’s favorite tools of distortion is mock even-handedness. Editors and writers stack a story to fit the Times’s ideological requirements and then drag in an ostentatiously unappealing conservative figure to represent the other side. This has a double advantage. It allows the Times to pretend that is maintaining the ideal of reportorial “balance” and it also (depending on how awful the opposing personality seems) tends to discredit the competing viewpoint. It’s long been obvious that this is how the Times operates, but it took the eagle-eyed folks at Powerlineblog.comto catch them in the act. When the Times’s story was first posted, a hasty editor left the instruction “need some quote from supporter” dangling on a line by itself before moving on to Hans Kung, the criticisms of “liberal” Catholics, and the way the Pope “enforced rigid adherence to many basic Church teachings.” The Times has since removed the incriminating reminder, but Powerlineblog.com has preserved an image of the original story.

“Need some quote from supporter.” The Times needn’t have looked far. In the world at large, the man of humble origins who was born Karol Wojtyla in Poland in 1920 and who became a priest in 1946, is acknowledged as one of the greatest political and spiritual leaders of the last century.

In politics, no one, with the possible exception of Ronald Reagan, did as much to hasten the end of the totalitarian blight of Soviet Communism. “Be not afraid,” John Paul proclaimed in St. Peter’s Square in October 1978, shortly after becoming Pope. “More than one year after he spoke these words,” Lech Walesa, the founder of the Solidarity movement said, “we were able to organize 10 million people for strikes, protests and negotiations. Earlier we tried, I tried, and we couldn’t do it. . . Of course, communism would have fallen, but much later and in a bloody way. He was a gift from the heavens to us.”

In religion, John Paul helped preserve the Catholic Church from becoming a latitudinarian social club devoted to a minimalist theology and progressive orthodoxy on moral and political matters. The New York Times bemoaned the Pope’s “rigid adherence to many basic Church teachings.” (“Rigid” is nice: as opposed to what – flaccid? dilatory? non-commital?) But in fact his robust traditionalism saved the Catholic Church from the ghastly irrelevance and dwindling congregations that most I’m-okay-you’re-okay religious denominations have suffered in recent decades.

The priest who officiated at my wedding opined that John Paul was the most important Pope-theologian since Gregory the Great. Gregory died in 604, so there has been a lot of competition. Still, I suspect my friend was right. A philosopher by training, an actor and poet in his youth, John Paul was graced with a penetrating intelligence and charismatic personality. He was an eloquent advocate for the poor, the disenfranchised, the downtrodden. He was also our advocate: we whose poverty survives affluence and plenty. For us, John Paul saw, the great temptations were nihilism – the rejection of meaning and the repudiation of truth – and scientism, “the illusion that, thanks to scientific and technical progress, man and woman may live as a demiurge, single-handedly and completely taking charge of their destiny.” We are not demiurges, only fallible human beings. It was John Paul’s supreme legacy to have reminded us that, without a recognition of what transcends him, man cannot be fully human.

Mr. Kimball is managing editor of the New Criterion and author of “The Rape of the Masters: How Political Correctness Sabotages Art.”