THIS WORLD.(The Talk of the Town)(Pope John Paul II's foreign visits)

It's been a long papacy, beginning, a quarter century ago, in a humility so genuine and tender, and so exotically not Italian, that Charlotte the saintly spider could have spun her "humble" over the white cap that Karol Wojtyla put on when he became Pope John Paul II. This pope was the voice of the fall of Communism and much of the moral courage behind it. He was the voice of reconciliation between the Roman Catholic Church and two millennia of excoriated Jews. But for years he's been ill, and today he is in every way incapacitated, beholden to his oldest obsessions, his harshest dicta, and his most reactionary keepers.

What most students of the papacy agree on is that John Paul II has been blindsided by his own life. It's a syndrome that journalists recognize as professional deformation: you'd leave East Germany, or, for that matter, Poland, so undone by the experience of the police state in its particular Stalinist insanity that for a while you'd filter the rest of the world through the lens of that experience. You had to compensate for it, and when you looked at, say, the Catholic-liberation movements of Latin America you saw Red instead of seeing poverty and spiritual thirst and the first stirrings of empowerment. It's pretty much acknowledged that for John Paul II time stopped with Poland at the moment of its liberation. Like many children of authoritarian states, he absorbed some strong lessons about claiming and enforcing power. Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, talking to Frank Bruni, of the Times, ranked his collegiality as "good in parts," like the proverbial rotten egg. The Pope is in fact an unrepentant populist. In the early eighties, when he was trying on the image of a road-show pontiff, he arrived in Paris, rushed through Mass with the Archbishop and the whole hierarchy of Church notables at Notre-Dame, and then headed straight to the Chapel of Our Lady of the Miraculous Medal--a pilgrimage center tucked into the Rue du Bac, between a pricey traiteur and the Bon Marche--where, a hundred and fifty years earlier, a young novice had had a vision of the Virgin. It was the kind of place where he preferred to pray, and it was also (somewhat improbably, given its location) the most frequented shrine in France, after Lourdes--a place for "the people," for miracles and cures and saints' worship and mother worship and nuns who sold slivers of the novice's few remaining bones (but were, of course, forbidden to administer the Eucharist).

Close to a billion Catholics loved the road show. John Paul II spoke to their hearts, and they were spared the rigors of dissent. They were not involved in the politics of the Holy See, or party to the increasing isolation of the Pope and his very protective Vatican circle--known to Catholic liberals as "the neocons"--from what you would have to describe as the real world. Lately, the Pope has been as much of a warrior against the consumer capitalism of the West as he was against the Communism of the East, but the truth is that most of his flock has no money with which to consume anything. James Carroll, who left the priesthood but went on to write, among other books, the remarkable profession of repentance and ...