A Man for All Seasons

God Bless Karol Wojtyla. Pope John Paul II is dead. Ronald Reagan, Karol Wojtyla...Only Margaret Thatcher remains. Without all three of them, we could still be facing down a Soviet Empire to this day. Reagan had the vision and the leadership, Thatcher held the fort and bucked up the Western Europeans, and Pope John Paul II inspired revolt in Poland, striking fear into the Soviet Empire to such an extent that they tried to have him assassinated..........................T
"Pope John Paul II died today. In the post-Berlin Wall world this man did so much to shape, it's difficult to recall the much different circumstances that obtained when he assumed the chair of St. Peter. Former Italian prime minister Aldo Moro had been kidnapped and executed by terrorists. In Iran bloody protests were brewing that would within months pull down the Shah and usher in the ayatollahs. In the Soviet Union the dissident Anatoly Shcharansky (now the Israeli Natan Sharansky) was dispatched to the gulag, while Afghanistan had already endured the leftist coup that would, in short order, lead to a full-fledged Soviet invasion.
Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher were still in the future, and so was a workers' strike called by an unknown Pole named Lech Walesa. Everywhere one looked, the truth of the Brezhnev Doctrine seemed brutally self-evident: Once Communist, always Communist. Oh, yes: The Catholic Church which this first Slavic pope found himself bequeathed was thought by many to be hopelessly irrelevant to the crises of modern times."