<p> In a time of moral confusion, John Paul II is resolute about
his ideals and eager to impose them on a world that often differs
with him
</p>
<p>By Paul Gray--Reported by Thomas Sancton and Greg Burke/Rome, Joseph Ngala/Nairobi
and John Moody and Richard N. Ostling/New York
</p>
<p> People who see him--and countless millions have--do not
forget him. His appearances generate an electricity unmatched
by anyone else on earth. That explains, for instance, why in
rural Kenyan villages thousands of children, plus many cats
and roosters and even hotels, are named John Paul. Charisma
is the only conceivable reason why a CD featuring him saying
the rosary--in Latin--against a background of Bach and Handel
is currently ascending the charts in Europe. It also accounts
for the dazed reaction of a young woman who found herself, along
with the thousands around her in a sports stadium in Denver,
cheering and applauding him: "I don't react that way to rock
groups. What is it that he has?"
</p>
<p> Pope John Paul II has, among many other things, the world's
bully-est pulpit. Few of his predecessors over the past 2,000
years have spoken from it as often and as forcefully as he.
When he talks, it is not only to his flock of nearly a billion;
he expects the world to listen. And the flock and the world
listen, not always liking what they hear. This year he cast
the net of his message wider than ever: Crossing the Threshold
of Hope, his meditations on topics ranging from the existence
of God to the mistreatment of women, became an immediate best
seller in 12 countries. It is an unprecedented case of mass
proselytizing by a Pontiff--arcane but personal, expansive
but resolute about its moral message.
</p>
<p> John Paul can also impose his will, and there was no more formidable
and controversial example of this than the Vatican's intervention
at the U.N.'s International Conference on Population and Development
in Cairo in September. There the Pope's emissaries defeated
a U.S.-backed proposition John Paul feared would encourage abortions
worldwide. The consequences may be global and--critics predict--catastrophic, particularly in the teeming Third World, where
John Paul is so admired.
</p>
<p> The Pontiff was unfazed by the widespread opprobrium. His popular
book and his unpopular diplomacy, he explained to TIME two weeks
ago, share one philosophical core: "It always goes back to the
sanctity of the human being." He added, "The Pope must be a
moral force." In a year when so many people lamented the decline
in moral values or made excuses for bad behavior, Pope John
Paul II forcefully set forth his vision of the good life and
urged the world to follow it. For such rectitude--or recklessness,
as his detractors would have it--he is TIME's Man of the Year.
</p>
<p> The Pope is, in Catholic belief, a direct successor of St. Peter's,
the rock on whom Jesus Christ built his church. As such, John
Paul sees it as his duty to trouble the living stream of modernity.
He stands solidly against much that the secular world deems
progressive: the notion, for example, that humans share with
God the right to determine who will and will not be born. He
also lectures against much that the secular world deems inevitable:
the abysmal inequalities between the wealthy and the wretched
of the earth, the sufferings of those condemned to lives of
squalor, poverty and oppression. "He really has a will and a
determination to help humanity through spirituality," says the
Dalai Lama. "That is marvelous. That is good. I know how difficult
it is for leaders on these issues."
</p>
<p> John Paul's impact on the world has already been enormous, ranging
from the global to the personal. He has covered more than half
a million miles in his travels. Many believe his support of
the trade union Solidarity in his native Poland was a precipitating
event in the collapse of the Soviet bloc. After he was nearly
killed in 1981, he visited and pardoned his would-be assassin
in jail. Asked an awed Mehmet Ali Agca: "Tell me why it is that
I could not kill you?" Even those who contest the words of John
Paul do not argue with his integrity--or his capacity to forgive
those who trespass against him.
</p>
<p> His power rests in the word, not the sword. As he has demonstrated
throughout the 16 years of his papacy, John Paul needs no divisions.
He is an army of one, and his empire is both as ethereal and
as ubiquitous as the soul. In a slum in Nairobi, Mary Kamati
is dying of AIDS. In her mud house hangs a portrait of John
Paul. "This is the only Pope who has come to this part of the
world," she says. During his most recent visit, he sprinkled
her with holy water. "That," she says, eyes trembling, "is the
way to heaven."
</p>
<p> In 1994 the Pope's health visibly deteriorated. His left hand
shakes, and he hobbles with a cane, the result of bone-replacement
surgery. Asked about his health, he offered an "Oh, so-so" to
TIME. It is thus with increased urgency that John Paul has presented
himself, the defender of Roman Catholic doctrine, as a moral
compass for believers and nonbelievers alike. He spread through
every means at his disposal a message not of expedience or compromise
but of right and wrong; amid so much fear of the future, John
Paul dared to speak of hope. He did not say what everyone wanted
to hear, and many within and beyond his church took offense.
But his fidelity to what he believes people need to hear remained
adamant and unwavering. "He'll go down in history as the greatest
of our modern Popes," says the Rev. Billy Graham. "He's been
the strong conscience of the whole Christian world."
</p>
<p> And then there was the sorry state of the globe he proposed
to save. Patches of the Third World sank further into revolutionary
bloodshed, disease and famine. The developed nations began to
resemble weird updatings of Hieronymous Bosch: panoramas of
tormented bodies, lashed, flailed and torn by the instruments
of material self-gratification. Secular leaders dithered and
disagreed and then did nothing about the slow death of Bosnia,
the massacres in Rwanda.
</p>
<p> Private behavior appeared equally adrift. People trained to
know better showed that they did not, notably the younger members
of Britain's royal family, who energetically pursued self-implosion,
with TV documentaries and books their detonators of choice.
In Los Angeles two separate juries could not agree on a verdict
in the trials of Lyle and Erik Menendez, young men who admitted
killing their parents, at close range, with shotguns. The nightly
news became a saraband of sleaze: Tonya, Lorena, Michael, O.J.;
after 10 days of claiming to have been the victim of a carjacking,
a South Carolina mother confessed she pushed the vehicle into
a lake with her two tiny sons strapped inside.
</p>
<p> The secular response to the tawdriness of contemporary life
was not uplifting; it largely amounted to a mingy, mean spirited
vindictiveness, a searching for scapegoats. Many interpreted
the Republican sweep in the November elections as a sign that
voters were as mad as hell and ready for old-fashioned verities.
That seemed to be the view of incoming House Speaker Newt Gingrich,
who called for a constitutional amendment allowing voluntary
school prayer in public schools. He also suggested it might
be a good idea to fill orphanages with the children of welfare
mothers.
</p>
<p> John Paul was personally affected by the turmoil of 1994. He
could not make planned visits to Beirut and Sarajevo because
enmities on the ground were too volatile. Rwanda dealt him particular
grief: an estimated 85% of Rwandans are Christians, and more
than 60% of those Roman Catholics. Some priests were accessories
to massacre. The new faith was unable to overcome tribal conflict.
</p>
<p> But when circumstances allowed him to act, John Paul did so
decisively. His major goals have been to clarify church doctrine--believers may experience doubt but should be spared confusion--and to reach out to the world, seek contacts with other faiths
and proclaim to all the sanctity of the individual, body and
soul.
</p>
<p> He made advances on all of these fronts in 1994. The Catechism
of the Catholic Church appeared in English translation, the
first such comprehensive document issued since the 16th century.
It clearly summarizes all the essential beliefs and moral tenets
of the church. Some Catholics believe it will be the most enduring
landmark of John Paul's papacy. In June, John Paul oversaw the
establishment of diplomatic relations between the Holy See and
Israel, ending a tense standoff that had existed ever since
1948.
</p>
<p> In May the Pope released an apostolic letter in which he set
to rest, for the foreseeable future, the question of the ordination
of women. His answer, in brief, was no. The document disappointed
and outraged many Catholic women and men; even some sympathetic
to the Pope felt that his peremptory tone, his strict argument
from precedent, i.e., that Christ appointed only males as his
Apostles, represented a missed opportunity to teach, to explain
an exclusionary policy that contemporary believers find outmoded
or beyond understanding.
</p>
<p> The high or the low point of the Pope's year, depending on who
did the reporting, came in September. The U.N. population conference
convened in Cairo, with representatives from 185 nations and
the Holy See in attendance. On the table was a 113-page plan
calling on governments to commit $17 billion annually by the
year 2000 to curb global population growth. About 90% of the
draft document had been approved in advance by the participants,
but the remaining 10% contained some bombshells John Paul had
seen coming. The most explosive was Paragraph 8.25, which owed
its inclusion in part to a March 16 directive from the Clinton
Administration to all U.S. embassies; it stated that "the United
States believes access to safe, legal and voluntary abortion
is a fundamental right of all women" and insisted the Cairo
conference endorse that policy.
</p>
<p> John Paul was not in Cairo, but he kept in constant touch with
his delegation. Vatican spokesman Joaquin Navarro-Valls recalls
the Pope's reaction to Paragraph 8.25: "He feared that for the
first time in the history of humanity, abortion was being proposed
as a means of population control. He put all the prestige of
his office at the service of this issue." For nine days the
Vatican delegates, under his direction, lobbied and filibustered;
they kept their Latin American bloc in line and struck up alliances
with Islamic nations opposed to abortion. In the end, the Pope
won. The Cairo conference inserted an explicit statement that
"in no case should abortion be promoted as a method of family
planning"; in return the Vatican gave partial consent to the
document.
</p>
<p> In public relations terms, it was a costly victory. There he
goes again, the standard argument ran, imposing his sectarian
morality on a world already hungry and facing billions of new
mouths to feed in the coming decades. One Spanish critic said
the Pope had "become a traveling salesman of demographic irrationality."
Says dissident Swiss theologian Hans Kung: "This Pope is a disaster
for our church. There's charm there, but he's closed-minded."
The British Catholic weekly the Tablet summed up Cairo, "Never
has the Vatican cared less about being unpopular than under
Pope John Paul II."
</p>
<p> Cairo perfectly crystallized reciprocal conundrums: the problem
of the Pope in the modern world and the problem the Pope has
with the modern world. The conflict boils down to different
paths of reason and standards of truth. In Crossing the Threshold
of Hope, John Paul locates the source of the great schism between
faith and logic in the writings of the 17th century French philosopher
Rene Descartes, particularly his assertion "Cogito ergo sum"
(I think; therefore I am). The Pope points out that Descartes's
formulation turned on its head St. Thomas Aquinas' 13th century
pronouncement that existence comes before thought--indeed,
makes thought possible. Descartes could presumably have written
"Sum ergo cogito," but then the history of the past 300 years
might have been profoundly different.
</p>
<p> Although not the only one, Descartes was a major inspiration
for the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment. Truth became
a matter not of doctrine or received traditions but of something
materially present on earth, accessible either through research
or sound reasoning. "Know then thyself, presume not God to scan,"
Alexander Pope wrote in 1733-34. "The proper study of Mankind
is Man."
</p>
<p> The human intellect, thus liberated, proved prodigious; the
fruits of its accomplishments are ever present in the developed
world and tantalizingly seductive to those peering in from outside
the gates. John Paul is not a fundamentalist who wants to repeal
the Enlightenment and destroy the tools of technology; the most
traveled, most broadcast Pope in history knows the advantages
of jet airplanes and electronics.
</p>
<p> Instead he argues that rationalism, by itself, is not enough:
"This world, which appears to be a great workshop in which knowledge
is developed by man, which appears as progress and civilization,
as a modern system of communications, as a structure of democratic
freedoms without any limitations, this world is not capable
of making man happy."
</p>
<p> In essence, the Pope and his critics are talking at cross-purposes,
about different universes. His reaffirmations of the church's
doctrines on sexual matters actually form a small part of his
teachings, but they have drawn most of the attention of troubled
Catholics and the Pope's critics in the West. The conviction
is widespread that sexual morality and conduct are private concerns,
strictly between individuals and their consciences. But who
guides those consciences? the Pope would ask. Many population
experts see a future tide of babies as a problem to be solved;
the Pope sees these infants-in-waiting as precious lives, the
gifts of God. The church's doctrine that condoms should not
be used under any circumstances has provoked, in the age of
AIDS, deep anger. Henri Tincq, who writes on religious subjects
for Paris' Le Monde, sums up this reaction, "The church's refusal
of condoms even for saving lives is absolutely incomprehensible.
It disqualifies the church from having any role in the whole
debate over AIDS." As heartless as John Paul's position may
seem, it is consistent with his view of the world: the way to
halt the effects of unsafe sexual practices is to stop the practices.
</p>
<p> Those who will never agree with the Pope on birth control, abortion,
homosexuality and so on may nonetheless have benefited from
hearing him speak out. Says Father Thomas Reese of the Woodstock
Theological Center in Washington: "He's the one keeping these
issues alive, things people should reflect on morally. He can't
force them to do things, but he provides a constant reminder
that these are moral questions, not simply medical or economic
ones."
</p>
<p> John Paul has never stepped back from difficulties, and he looks
forward to an arduous 1995 agenda. First up is a scheduled 10-day
trip in January to Papua New Guinea, Australia, Sri Lanka and
the Philippines, where the Archbishop of Manila is in open conflict
with the country's Protestant President over population control.
The Pope is also laying strategy for the 1995 U.N. World Conference
on Women in Beijing, which figures to be a replay of Cairo.
In June, he plans to meet with Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew
I, the leader of the Eastern Orthodox Church. John Paul has
long spoken of mending the breach between the Roman and Eastern
churches that became final in 1054. The Berlin Wall, put up
in 1961, came down 11 years into his papacy; undoing the effects
of a millennium may take him a little longer.
</p>
<p> The Man of the Year's ideas about what can be accomplished differ
from those of most mortals. They are far grander, informed by
a vision as vast as the human determination to bring them into
being. After discovering the principle of the lever and the
fulcrum in the 3rd century B.C., Archimedes wrote, "Give me
where to stand, and I will move the earth." John Paul knows
