But his supporters underestimated how much Wojtyla's criticisms of communism were products of his condemnation of a West that no longer had morals or faith, one that was enamored of profit and a slave to consumption. The anti-bourgeois Wojtyla was much more steadfast than the anti-communist Wojtyla: To him communism was merely the unwanted byproduct of a more radical evil, the evil of the West.

His position was clear three years before he became pope. At the time, of course, everything was understood within this context: The lone true enemy of the church and the free world lay to the East, or was at least colored red. John Paul II was the right pope to fight the holy war.

He fought that war, and won it. But he didn't celebrate that victory, or claim any credit.

"Communism fell by itself, as a consequence of its mistakes and abuses," he said after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

For him, the fall of communism served only to unmask the real enemy: a global empire of technology and consumerism, tyrant of the poor and destroyer of the faith.

In his papal documents John Paul II never saw any innate good in capitalism. Left to its own devices, he wrote, capitalism remains irreparably pernicious and savage. To domesticate it and make it acceptable to the church, nothing would be better than to resuscitate "the good things brought about by communism: the fight against unemployment and care for the poor."

But didn't capitalism embrace the cult of freedom, something so dear to the church? Yes and no, the pope answered: Freedom is valuable only if it is "educated," and only the church has received from above the capacity to teach about good and true freedom.

In June 1991 John Paul II returned to his native Poland for the fourth time since his election. The wall had fallen and the Soviet empire was in pieces, but the pope refused to celebrate. Quite to the contrary, never had he seemed so furious at his countrymen.

He often delivered impromptu speeches during that trip, and in those words that hadn't been committed to paper -- and hadn't passed through the sifter of diplomacy -- he allowed his genuine thoughts to flow, thoughts expressed in one such off-the-cuff speech in Wloclawek.

"Yielding to desire, to sex, to consumption: this is the Europeanism that is backed by certain exponents of our need to join Europe," he said. "We created Europe, with much more strength than those who claim the sole rights to Europeanism. What is their criterion? Freedom. But what freedom? The freedom to take the life of an unborn baby? Brothers and sisters, I protest against this concept of Europe that is upheld in the West...."

Poland was the biggest disappointment for history's first Polish pope, because after being liberated from the yoke of communism the country immediately fell prey to the evil of the West, to what he called "a freedom that creates slaves."

John Paul II never accepted democracy without reservations. He always saw in it the tyranny of the majority, a modern serpent in the Garden of Eden. He never lived under democratic rule until he was elected pope and moved to Italy. But soon after arriving he was confronted with an example of the tyranny he feared -- Italy's 1981 passage of an abortion law that was among the most permissive in the world.

Laws permitting abortion were much more than an ordinary mistake, the pope believed. They were the new holocaust of the last half of the 20^th century. And it was precisely this "planned cemetery of the unborn" that in his eyes proved the evil beneath democracy's mask.

"Can there exist a decision-making body, a parliament, that has the right to legalize the killing of an innocent and defenseless human being?" he asked, and responded with a resounding, "No."

In "The Gospel of Life" (1995), John Paul demanded public disobedience of Caesar in the name of God: "When a civil law legitimizes abortion or euthanasia," he wrote, "it ceases, for that very reason, to be a true civil law and therefore morally obligatory.... It is entirely absent authentic juridical validity."

This hammering away without pause on the issues of abortion, the family and sex was not a "personal obsession" of his, nor was it -- as some biographers have hypothesized -- the consequence of an unhappy childhood.

John Paul's incessant preaching on these themes was entirely consistent with his vision of the world: The evil of the West reached its apex, in the pope's eyes, when it tried to violate that sanctum sanctorum that is the life of each human being, from birth to death.

He was well aware this stance would put him at odds with many governments, even the most democratic.

"The powers of this world don't always look fondly upon a pope such as myself," he once said.

In matters of peace and war, too, John Paul often seemed to row against the current. In 1990-1991 he protested until the end that there should be no war over Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait, a stance that put him at loggerheads with the entire West, with most Arab leaders and even with the bishops of many Catholic countries, including Italy.

In the Bosnian conflict he took the opposite tack, demanding that the West intervene to "disarm the aggressor" and impose a cease-fire.

In the interminable conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, John Paul's entreaties that any framework for peace should include an international charter governing Jerusalem and its holy sites went generally unheeded.

He was not a pacifist on principle, John Paul insisted, and his claims were borne out in his actions. Every so often he was obliged to judge whether a war was "just" or not, and this too jibed with his idea that the church possesses the wisdom to "educate" the rest of the world about the proper use of freedom and, therefore, about peace.

John Paul reserved his firepower, more than any other topic, for the question of abortion. In this area he allowed for no exceptions: No abortion could ever be considered morally acceptable, ever.

His battle culminated in 1994 in Cairo, at the United Nations International Conference on Population and Development. The word "abortion" was not in any of the documents being prepared at the conference, but there was frequent use of the phrase "reproductive health" -- a diplomatic compromise unacceptable to the pope.

"Everyone knows that it includes free abortion." he said.

John Paul hammered home his objections so strongly -- first with world leaders, then with Nafis Sadik, secretary general of the conference, and finally in a stormy audience with President Clinton -- that he dominated the conference, even though he was not physically present.

He stood alone against the rest of the world, and in the end he triumphed: On paper the conference ended without a winner; in reality John Paul used it as a pulpit to challenge the West. He succeeded in putting before the world his perspective on good and evil, on justice and injustice and, most of all, on what he saw as each new human being's ineradicable right to live.